Yes, the neurobabble critique seems right on.
Interesting that he does not get us to the perplexities of the cultural
mediation of perception.
mike
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> The opening 3-point blast against neurobabble is wonderful to read. I agree
> with every word of it but it is very satisfying to see it in print. The
> remainder of the article is interesting too. Thanks for that Jorge. I am
> going to preserve that opening bit!
>
> Andy
>
>
> Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns wrote:
>
>> An interesting article in the NYT. People feel and think, brains don't.
>> Jorge
>>
>>
>>
>> DECEMBER 19, 2010, 5:18 PM
>> A Real Science of Mind
>>
>> By TYLER BURGE
>> The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely
>> and timeless.
>>
>> Tags:
>>
>> Brain, Eyes and Eyesight, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology and
>> Psychologists
>>
>> In recent years popular science writing has bombarded us with titillating
>> reports of discoveries of the brain’s psychological prowess. Such reports
>> invade even introductory patter in biology and psychology. We are told that
>> the brain — or some area of it sees, decides, reasons, knows, emotes, is
>> altruistic/egotistical, or wants to make love. For example, a recent
>> article reports a researcher’s “looking at love, quite literally, with the
>> aid of an MRI machine.” One wonders whether lovemaking is to occur between
>> two brains, or between a brain and a human being.
>>
>> There are three things wrong with this talk.
>>
>> First, it provides little insight into psychological phenomena. Often the
>> discoveries amount to finding stronger activation in some area of the brain
>> when a psychological phenomenon occurs. As if it is news that the brain is
>> not dormant during psychological activity! The reported neuroscience is
>> often descriptive rather than explanatory. Experiments have shown that
>> neurobabble produces the illusion of understanding. But little of it is
>> sufficiently detailed to aid, much less provide, psychological explanation.
>>
>> The idea that the neural can replace the psychological is the same idea
>> that led to thinking that all psychological ills can be cured with drugs.
>> Second, brains-in-love talk conflates levels of explanation. Neurobabble
>> piques interest in science, but obscures how science works. Individuals
>> see, know, and want to make love. Brains don’t. Those things are
>> psychological — not, in any evident way, neural. Brain activity is
>> necessary for psychological phenomena, but its relation to them is complex.
>>
>> Imagine that reports of the mid-20th-century breakthroughs in biology had
>> focused entirely on quantum mechanical interactions among elementary
>> particles. Imagine that the reports neglected to discuss the structure or
>> functions of DNA. Inheritance would not have been understood. The level of
>> explanation would have been wrong. Quantum mechanics lacks a notion of
>> function, and its relation to biology is too complex to replace biological
>> understanding. To understand biology, one must think in biological terms.
>>
>> Discussing psychology in neural terms makes a similar mistake.
>> Explanations of neural phenomena are not themselves explanations of
>> psychological phenomena. Some expect the neural level to replace the
>> psychological level. This expectation is as naive as expecting a single
>> cure for cancer. Science is almost never so simple. See John Cleese’s apt
>> spoof of such reductionism.
>>
>> The third thing wrong with neurobabble is that it has pernicious feedback
>> effects on science itself. Too much immature science has received massive
>> funding, on the assumption that it illuminates psychology. The idea that
>> the neural can replace the psychological is the same idea that led to
>> thinking that all psychological ills can be cured with drugs.
>>
>> Perceptual psychology, not neuroscience, should be grabbing headlines.
>> Correlations between localized neural activity and specific psychological
>> phenomena are important facts. But they merely set the stage for
>> explanation. Being purely descriptive, they explain nothing. Some
>> correlations do aid psychological explanation. For example, identifying
>> neural events underlying vision constrains explanations of timing in
>> psychological processes and has helped predict psychological effects. We
>> will understand both the correlations and the psychology, however, only
>> through psychological explanation.
>>
>> Scientific explanation is our best guide to understanding the world. By
>> reflecting on it, we learn better what we understand about the world.
>>
>> Neurobabble’s popularity stems partly from the view that psychology’s
>> explanations are immature compared to neuroscience. Some psychology is
>> indeed still far from rigorous. But neurobabble misses an important fact.
>>
>> A powerful, distinctively psychological science matured over the last four
>> decades. Perceptual psychology, pre-eminently vision science, should be
>> grabbing headlines. This science is more advanced than many biological
>> sciences, including much neuroscience. It is the first science to explain
>> psychological processes with mathematical rigor in distinctively
>> psychological terms. (Generative linguistics — another relatively mature
>> psychological science — explains psychological structures better than
>> psychological processes.)
>>
>> Erin Schell
>> What are distinctively psychological terms? Psychology is distinctive in
>> being a science of representation. The term “representation” has a generic
>> use and a more specific use that is distinctively psychological. I start
>> with the generic use, and will return to the distinctively psychological
>> use. States of an organism generically represent features of the
>> environment if they function to correlate with them. A plant or bacterium
>> generically represents the direction of light. States involved in growth or
>> movement functionally correlate with light’s direction.
>>
>> Task-focused explanations in biology and psychology often use “represent”
>> generically, and proceed as follows. They identify a natural task for an
>> organism. They then measure environmental properties relevant to the task,
>> and constraints imposed by the organism’s bio-physical make-up. Next, they
>> determine mathematically optimal performance of the task, given the
>> environmental properties and the organism’s constraints. Finally, they
>> develop hypotheses and test the organism’s fulfillment of the task against
>> optimal performance.
>>
>> This approach identifies systematic correlations between organisms’ states
>> and environmental properties. Such correlations constitute generic
>> representation. However, task-focused explanations that use
>> “representation” generically are not distinctively psychological. For they
>> apply to states of plants, bacteria, and water pumps, as well as to
>> perception and thought.
>>
>> Explanation in perceptual psychology is a sub-type of task-focused
>> explanation. What makes it distinctively psychological is that it uses
>> notions like representational accuracy, a specific type of correlation.
>>
>> The difference between functional correlation and representational
>> accuracy is signaled by the fact that scientific explanations of
>> light-sensitivity in plants or bacteria invoke functional correlation, but
>> not states capable of accuracy. Talk of accuracy would be a rhetorical
>> afterthought. States capable of accuracy are what vision science is
>> fundamentally about.
>>
>> Science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in
>> the last half century. It should not be obscured by neurobabble.
>> Why are explanations in terms of representational accuracy needed? They
>> explain perceptual constancies. Perceptual constancies are capacities to
>> perceive a given environmental property under many types of stimulation.
>> You and a bird can see a stone as the same size from 6 inches or 60 yards
>> away, even though the size of the stone’s effect on the retina differs. You
>> and a bee can see a surface as yellow bathed in white or red light, even
>> though the distribution of wavelengths hitting the eye differ.
>>
>> Plants and bacteria (and water-pumps) lack perceptual constancies.
>> Responses to light by plants and bacteria are explained by reference to
>> states determined by properties of the light stimulus — frequency,
>> intensity, polarization — and by how and where light stimulates their
>> surfaces.
>>
>> Visual perception is getting the environment right — seeing it,
>> representing it accurately. Standard explanations of neural patterns cannot
>> explain vision because such explanations do not relate vision, or even
>> neural patterns, to the environment. Task-focused explanations in terms of
>> functional correlation do relate organisms’ states to the environment. But
>> they remain too generic to explain visual perception.
>>
>> Perceptual psychology explains how perceptual states that represent
>> environmental properties are formed. It identifies psychological patterns
>> that are learned, or coded into the perceptual system through eons of
>> interaction with the environment. And it explains how stimulations cause
>> individuals’ perceptual states via those patterns. Perceptions and
>> illusions of depth, movement, size, shape, color, sound localization, and so
>> on, are explained with mathematical rigor.
>>
>> Perceptual psychology uses two powerful types of explanation — one,
>> geometrical and traditional; the other, statistical and cutting-edge.
>>
>> Here is a geometrical explanation of distance perception. Two angles and
>> the length of one side determine a triangle. A point in the environment
>> forms a triangle with the two eyes. The distance between the eyes in many
>> animals is constant. Suppose that distance to be innately coded in the
>> visual system. Suppose that the system has information about the angles at
>> which the two eyes are pointing, relative to the line between the eyes.
>> Then the distance to the point in the environment is computable. Descartes
>> postulated this explanation in 1637. There is now rich empirical evidence
>> to indicate that this procedure, called “convergence,” figures in perception
>> of distance. Convergence is one of over 15 ways human vision is known to
>> represent distance or depth.
>>
>> Here is a statistical explanation of contour grouping. Contour grouping
>> is representing which contours (including boundary contours) “go together,”
>> for example, as belonging to the same object. Contour grouping is a step
>> toward perception of object shape. Grouping boundary contours that belong
>> to the same object is complicated by this fact: Objects commonly occlude
>> other objects, obscuring boundary contours of partially occluded objects.
>> Grouping boundaries on opposite sides of an occluder is a step towards
>> perceiving object shape.
>>
>> To determine how boundary contours should ideally be grouped, numerous
>> digital photographs of natural scenes are collected. Hundreds of thousands
>> of contours are extracted from the photographic images. Each pair is
>> classified as to whether or not it corresponds to boundaries of the same
>> object. The distances and relative orientations between paired
>> image-contours are recorded. Given enough samples, the probability that two
>> photographic image-contours correspond to contours on the same object can be
>> calculated. Probabilities vary depending on distance — and orientation
>> relations among the image-contours. So whether two image-contours
>> correspond to boundaries of the same object depends statistically on
>> properties of image-contours.
>>
>> Human visual systems are known to record contour information. In
>> experiments, humans are shown only image-contours in photographs, not full
>> photographs. Their performance in judging which contours belong to the same
>> object, given only the image-contours, closely matches the objective
>> probabilities established from the photographs. Such tests support
>> hypotheses about how perceptions of object shape are formed from cues
>> regarding contour groupings.
>>
>> Representation, in the specific sense, and consciousness are the two
>> primary properties that are distinctive of psychological phenomena.
>> Consciousness is the what-it-is-like of experience. Representation is the
>> being-about-something in perception and thought. Consciousness is
>> introspectively more salient. Representation is scientifically better
>> understood.
>>
>> Where does mind begin? One beginning is the emergence of representational
>> accuracy — in arthropods. (We do not know where consciousness begins.)
>> Rigorous science of mind begins with perception, the first distinctively
>> psychological representation. Maturation of a science of mind is one of the
>> most important intellectual developments in the last half century. Its
>> momentousness should not be obscured by neurobabble that baits with
>> psychology, but switches to brain science. Brain and psychological sciences
>> are working toward one another. Understanding their relation depends on
>> understanding psychology. We have a rigorous perceptual psychology. It may
>> provide a model for further psychological explanation that will do more than
>> display an MRI and say, “behold, love.”
>>
>> Additional Reading:
>>
>> Charless C. Fowlkes, David R. Martin, and Jitendra Malik, “Local
>> Figure-Ground Cues are Valid for Natural Images,” Journal of Vision 7
>> (2007), 1-9.
>>
>> W.S. Geisler, “Visual Perception and the Statistical Properties of Natural
>> Scenes,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008), 10.1-10.26.
>>
>> David Knill, “Discriminating Planar Surface Slant from Texture: Human and
>> Ideal Observers Compared,” Vision Research, 38 (1998), 1683-1711.
>>
>> Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge,
>> Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
>>
>> D. Vishwanath, A.R. Girshick, and M.S. Banks, “Why Pictures Look Right
>> When Viewed from the Wrong Place,” Nature Neuroscience (2005), 1401-1410.
>>
>> D.S. Weisberg, F.C. Keil, J. Goodstein, E. Rawson, and J.R. Gray, “The
>> Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive
>> Neuroscience 20 (2008), 470-477.
>> Tyler Burge is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at U.C.L.A. He is the
>> author of many papers on philosophy of mind and three books with Oxford
>> University Press: “Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege,” “Foundations of
>> Mind,” and most recently, “Origins of Objectivity, which discusses the
>> origins of mind in perception and the success of perceptual psychology as a
>> science.
>>
>> Copyright 2010 The New York Times CompanyPrivacy PolicyNYTimes.com 620
>> Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018
>> Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
>> Profesor Asociado y Director
>> Departamento de Psicología
>> Universidad de los Andes
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 19, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Accountability: attached is my attempt to make sense of this during
>>> fieldwork in the 1980s.
>>> Martin
>>> <Packer Changing Classes.pdf>
>>>
>>> On Dec 19, 2010, at 10:56 AM, Richard Beach wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I put in "accountability" into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and found
>>>> a
>>>> marked increase in use of that word from 1985 to 2005
>>>> http://tinyurl.com/267lfd7
>>>>
>>>> As Richard Ohmann has noted, there was little use of "accountability"
>>>> applied to education prior to the 1980s. Given the rise of a business
>>>> management discourse (Fairclough), it has now become a primary discourse
>>>> for
>>>> framing school policies.
>>>>
>>>> All of this reflects the control of corporate America over the system
>>>> since
>>>> the 1980s. As reported in today's New York Times, the Supreme Court
>>>> sided
>>>> with business interests 29% during the Warren court and 47% during the
>>>> Burger court (1969-1985), as contrasted with 61% of the time during the
>>>> Roberts court (2005-2009).
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/12/19/us/politics/19roberts-graphicA
>>>> .
>>>> html?ref=us
>>>>
>>>> In his column, Frank Rich summed it all up by quoting the new Chair of
>>>> the
>>>> House finance committee that's supposed to oversee the finance industry:
>>>> "As
>>>> Bachus’s instantly notorious pronouncement
>>>> http://blog.al.com/sweethome/2010/12/spencer_bachus_finally_gets_hi.html
>>>> had it, 'My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to
>>>> serve
>>>> the banks.'" In truth, this congressman’s view has been the prevailing
>>>> view
>>>> in Washington under both parties since the Reagan administration.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 12/18/10 12:49 PM, "ANTHONY M BARRA" <tub80742@temple.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Across the blogosphere, everyone's playing with Google's Books Ngram
>>>>> Viewer.
>>>>>
>>>>> This seems like a crowd who'd enjoy this tool. But careful if you
>>>>> don't
>>>>> have some time to kill!
>>>>>
>>>>> http://bit.ly/dPNE04
>>>>> http://bit.ly/hdcxlN
>>>>> http://bit.ly/feXL47
>>>>>
>>>>> Overview of the program
>>>>> here<
>>>>> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-decline-of-man-
>>>>> as-a-word/68167/>
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>>> - Anthony (cheers from Villas, USA)
>>>>> __________________________________________
>>>>> _____
>>>>> xmca mailing list
>>>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>> __________________________________________
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>>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Joint Editor MCA: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Journal/
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